The Eldest Sibling
by SmileyBearStories
Summary: Being the eldest sibling comes with responsibility. It also comes with an intense desire to protect. Your younger siblings will always seem innocent and helpless in your eyes. Sometimes, this leads to ends that really don't justify the means.


Being the eldest sibling comes with responsibility. It also comes with an intense desire to protect. Your younger siblings will always seem innocent and helpless in your eyes. So when you are patrolling the city of Gotham with them and you are unexpectedly ambushed at the docks, yeah, you try to take on the most enemies, irrespective of how capable you know your vigilante, crime-fighting siblings might be of protecting themselves. Sometimes, this leads to ends that really don't justify the means. For example, being shot from behind, kicked into a wall and then being attacked by ten people at once, leaving you with more bruises than you'd like to count. Somehow, driven knowing the two little ones you are looking after are likely in a lot of danger, you slam two heads together leaving them unconscious and zap one with just enough volts to drop him from an escrima stick, hitting a second with a zap as he approaches from behind. You jump over one and kick two others in the head, the one you used as a pole vault falling to the ground. You crack his jaw with a punch, he's out. Then you beat off another before dashing across the docks and tackling your baby brother, taking the knife that had been aimed at him instead. You launch away from him and his would be stabber is flat on the ground unmoving in seconds. You unarm another and then pin one to a shipping container with Wing-Dings. You quickly search the yard. Eight left. You charge into the fight, short of breath and feeling lightheaded, but determined to let no one touch the little Robins tonight. You watch with a slight swell of pride in your aching chest as Red Robin easily takes one out. Unfortunately, it's short lived as a goon releases a gas pellet, filling the air with who knows what and Red Robin starts to cough. In seconds, you're pressing your re-breather into his mouth and zapping one guy while you catch another with a kick to the head. While Red Robin provides you with his re-breather, someone unexpectedly grabs his cape and yanks him down to the ground. You instinctively dive under him, your skull crashing against the cement instead, while his lands against you, and, few, he's ok. Despite the concussive force of the impact and the dampness forming in your hair, you're quickly back on your feet, adrenaline pumping thickly through your veins. Red Robin takes out one, Robin fights off another and you fight your way through the last three, leaving you the freedom to escape. You yell at your siblings to run, but as you turn to leave you promptly hit the concrete. Sometimes, the unideal endings that result from your overprotectiveness can lead to not so unhappy events. Like your youngest siblings crashing the second eldest sibling's base because you're dead to the world and he just so happens to have a place near the docks, since that's where the most action's at. While he's eager to express his annoyance at the sight of your two siblings dragging you into his evening, correction, early morning, he's also not hesitant about helping. He complains that a doctor would have been a better choice, but a bruised and worried Robin with a dislocated shoulder and a really spaced out Red Robin aren't eager to make comment. Not to mention all three know that isn't really an option. You are left to wake up in the small apartment in a pile of Robins, because there is only one bed and Jason was not taking the couch in his own apartment. You can't help but smile at this little family pile that all but you will deny existed. You're incredibly sore and a painful breath tears the smile from your face, but your precious younger siblings are safe and warm and that's all that counts. So why do we do it? Because we are the eldest, and we all swore the day we laid eyes on them, that we would never let the small child smiling up at us experience any kind of unhappiness, and if put in that same situation, you'd do the same thing all over again. You're the eldest sibling and that's just what you have to do.


End file.
